Various applications, e.g., in the automotive field, involve exchange of data on one or more bus networks. High data rate, robustness, fault detection, safety and low cost are desirable features for such applications.
Existing high data rate (e.g., 1 Mb/s) standardized vehicle communication systems may involve complex and accurate protocol controllers using external components. These may turn out to be expensive, especially when implemented as single chip analog/bipolar Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) and/or Application Specific Standard Products (ASSPs).
Vehicle lights (e.g., front, rear, and interior lights) are becoming increasingly sophisticated and distributed (e.g., Matrix LED, ambient LED). Controlling such sophisticated and distributed systems may involve a high data rate control. Moreover, automotive-grade safety and robustness are desirable, especially for front and rear lighting systems.
LED drivers can be cost-efficient, e.g., when employing single-chip technologies such as Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) technology. It is otherwise noted that high data rate protocol controllers using, e.g., BCD technology may be expensive and depend on an accurate clock source (crystal).
Differential wiring may be adopted for clock and data signals in order to facilitate robustness, which may increase wire “harness” cost.
The increasing complexity of the communication network in a vehicle, e.g., for driving distributed lighting sources, such as LED matrices, may therefore lead to an increase in production costs which may be hardly compatible with business models in the automotive industry.
One or more embodiments are applicable, for instance, to a CAN (Controller Area Network) bus. This is a well-known arrangement which can facilitate communication between, e.g., microcontrollers and devices on board of a vehicle without a host computer. Operation of a CAN bus can be based on a message-based protocol, as dealt with in standards such as, e.g., ISO 11898-2:2015 and ISO 11898-2:2016.